


And after all it was a great big world

by Liviapenn



Category: Lauren McLaughlin - Cycler series
Genre: Best Friends, Coping, Gen, Gender Issues, Yuletide 2009
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:03:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liviapenn/pseuds/Liviapenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Are Jack and Jill really the same person? Are Ramie and Tommy going to be okay? Takes place immediately after the end of the first book, "Cycler."</p>
            </blockquote>





	And after all it was a great big world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sadlikeknives](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/gifts).



Jill talks for hours, bursting into hysterical crying jags at random intervals, words spilling out through her sobs like she might die if she doesn't talk it all out. Sometimes her eyes go dark as she stares out over the lake, her voice gets low and hoarse and she starts describing memories and dreams that aren't even hers. Ramie holds her left hand and Tommy holds her right hand and the truth comes out, there on the rocky spit of sand between the land and the sea, in the weird pre-dawn hours where nothing looks quite real. When the sky starts turning purple-gray, Jill starts slowing down, and finally just stops in the middle of a sentence, like a clockwork doll, lips half-open and eyes glassy.

"Jill?" Ramie says after a while, squeezing her cold hand, and Jill's head drops, her jagged short hair revealing the tender, bare back of her neck.

"I'm gonna go lie down," Jill mumbles at her knees. She pushes herself to her feet, waving off Tommy and Ramie's uplifted arms of support. "No, no. I'm okay." She stumbles off in her oversized shoes and ill-fitting D&amp;G jacket, every move almost drunkenly deliberate, and leaves them sitting there.

Ramie watches as Jill practically crawls into the back seat of Ramie's Toyota, not even bothering to close the door after herself. Probably asleep as soon as her head hits the seat. Oh, Jill. Ramie wants to go crawl in with her, hold her close and stroke the soft curve of her buzz-cut. Wants to wake her up, scream and yell, shake her like a magic eight-ball. For one white-hot moment she just wants to let out a blood-curdling scream and then go jump in the lake. She feels like everything inside her would just burn the water away to steam the second she hit the surface. Plus her white tux is kind of a lost cause anyway. She sighs and flicks at some dirty gravel sticking to her pants, then looks up at Tommy.

"And now you know the _rest_ of the story," Tommy says in a funny old-fashioned radio voice. Then he starts laughing, which sets Ramie off, and she has to press her fist against her mouth to make herself stop. When she's calm again she scoots over next to Tommy and pokes him hard in the ribs.

"Tommy," she says, "you cannot freak."

Ramie said this already, before Jill woke up and told them everything, but at the moment, it deeply bears repeating.

"I'm... actually not," Tommy says. He squints off into the grey dawn, then frowns and scrubs his hair back with both hands. Ramie wishes she could frantically run her hands back through her hair, but if she tried she'd be thwarted by a hundred and ninety-eight hairpins. "It makes sense. I mean, it's crazy, but... it makes everything _else_ make sense."

Ramie nods.

"Do you still--"

"What?"

"You really like him." Tommy says calmly. "...Jack."

"Like is nowhere near the right word." Ramie is not in love with Jack. Not yet. But there is something between them, something amazing and hungry and alive, something desperate and wonderful. The way he touched her last night, the things he said, whispering in her ear... If Ramie were grasping for a convenient cliche, she'd say that Jack was making love to her like every moment was his last, but that's not right. She gets that, now. Not like every moment was his last, but like every moment was his first.

And he definitely loves her. She could see it in his eyes the first time they met, could tell from the way he talked to her, the way he _knew_ her. Somehow Ramie could see that it was real, not a stalkery obsession with an idealized object, not just infatuation with some faraway dream girl. He knew her. He loved her. How sexy is that? Jack almost sort of broke out of prison for her. Maybe even risked his life, if Jill's teary rambling about her mom and her bizarro medically-induced coma plan is to be believed. He stole a suit and snuck across town and somehow appeared at prom, just to see Ramie, just to give her that one perfect moment even though she kind of half-heartedly regrets that part of herself that's unreconstructedly unfeminist enough to actually want it. That one perfect dance, at prom, with that one perfect, romantic, devoted guy. God.

"So how is this going to work?" Tommy rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. He really does have nice hands. Nice wrists. For a skinny guy, anyway. "I mean, me dating Jill, and you being with _him_?"

"I don't... it'll be..." The words get stuck for a second. It's not jealousy, it's not possessiveness. Ramie is tired, that's all, and her ass hurts from sitting on this hard, cold rock. The thing is: Ramie loves Jill and she might love Jack. She definitely loves Jill enough to want her to be happy, and if Tommy makes her happy, then she doesn't really understand the problem. "They're not the same person."

Tommy laughs, looking away.

"What?"

"I don't know. Maybe I would have felt better about it if you'd said _They're two different people_," Tommy says. He gives Ramie an uncomfortably amused look, which she returns. "But are they? I mean-- Jill is--"

"Tommy!" Ramie reaches out and grabs Tommy's hand again, this time gripping tightly between both her hands, digging her fingers into his palm. Ramie has always been the speaker of uncomfortable truths in her friendship with Jill. That's their thing, their dynamic; Jill gets all tangled up in her own head, and Ramie lays it out straight. Jill gets distracted and dramatic, obsessed with her own navel, and Ramie is the one who tells her to just freaking _deal with it already._

So this is familiar. Comfortable, even. Ramie smiles crookedly. "You like Jill, she likes you. I like Jack, he likes me. This is extremely simple and very nice for all four of us. So there is nothing to freak out about, which is good. Because you and I _cannot_ freak out! You know why?"

Tommy actually takes the question seriously. Maybe because he can tell that Ramie is more serious than she's ever been in her life. "Because we care about Jill's feelings?"

"Because we don't want to be the reason Jill's mom shoots her with a giant tranquilizer gun and drags her off to Switzerland to be a lab rat in a padded room for a bunch of old guys in white coats who will pump her full of chemicals and electroshock her brain until she stops growing a penis!"

Tommy's jaw drops. But, to his credit, he doesn't make any weak objections like "That would never happen" or "Mrs. McTeague would never do that." Not after hearing Jill's side of the story.

"We have to be okay with this," Ramie insists loudly, then glances back over her shoulder at her car. It's okay; probably an atomic bomb explosion wouldn't wake Jill up right now. "Number one, because if we aren't, Jill will go catatonic, because she desperately wants to be normal and have normal friends and a normal boyfriend, which I understand now a lot better than I did before, but also, and maybe more importantly, number two-- because if we, Jill's closest friends, visibly freak out, then Mrs. McTeague will use our lack of ability to deal as proof to convince Jill that she will never have a normal life until she finds some way to, basically, kill Jack. And I--" Ramie's voice trembles as her throat tightens, and she hugs herself tightly around the waist, hunching forward. "I don't want Jack to get killed. And even if I didn't feel the way that I do about him, I would never want any part of Jill to get killed!"

"No, I don't-- me either," Tommy says, low and choked up. "I don't want that either. Uh, Ramie--"

Ramie glances up to see Tommy making an odd, pained face, then looking pointedly away, off at the distant trees.

"What?"

"You're, um, escaping," Tommy says, gesturing vaguely. Still not looking.

"What?" Ramie repeats, and then she looks down. Her left boob is sort of falling right out of her deeply expensive strapless emergency prom bra. "Oh, Lefty, why do you always have to be such an attention whore?"

Tommy cracks up, hunching forward over his knees. Ramie sighs and adjusts the ruffled lapels of her jacket, tugging everything back into place and shoving Lefty back into confinement. "Okay you can look now," she says, and Tommy looks back, half laughing and half blushing as he rubs his hands over his face. "Come on, don't be embarrassed, it's cool. I mean we totally have to be best friends now and tell each other everything anyway."

"Can we comb each others' hair and talk about boys?" Tommy says, deadpan.

"I was thinking not so much slumber party, more like support group."

"Gotcha." Tommy thinks about it. "Significant others of spontaneous cyclical sex-changers?"

"Yeah, we can work on the name." Ramie can't help a relieved smile. After a second, Tommy, for the first time since Jill stumbled out of the car to face them both with the truth, smiles back.

Ramie feels like they should do something to mark this new understanding, but it's not as if there's a standard etiquette. Do they shake hands? Hug and cry? Exchange a manly fist bump or celebratory high five? Finally Ramie just leans over (keeping her shoulders straight so that Lefty doesn't make a second break for freedom) and gives Tommy a kiss on the cheek. He turns towards her as she leans in, and it mostly catches the corner of his mouth, but that's fine. All friends here, right?

"You take care of Jill," Ramie instructs, scooting a little closer and leaning her head against Tommy's shoulder. "And I'll take care of Jack. And if we can just keep them both happy and healthy and sane and non-comatose until Jill graduates and/or turns eighteen, then she can get the hell out of Winterhead and..."

"And..."

Ramie pauses. "I don't know. _My_ plan is New York, it's always been New York. But I don't know..." Maybe by that time Jill and Jack will be ready to take control. To have a plan. Yeah. Ramie's going to go with that. She shrugs.

"Okay," Tommy murmurs, apparently okay with leaving things open-ended for now. He puts his arm around Ramie's shoulders and squeezes her in a brotherly, comforting manner. Ramie sighs, leaning on him. Hey, he's warm. Skinny guys are always warm. Lucky Jill. She lets her sticky mascara-coated eyes flutter closed, soothed in what is probably a deeply animal way by Tommy's body heat, and just drifts. Just for a second. In a while she'll get up and she'll wake up Jill and ask what she wants to do, and Jill probably won't know, so Ramie will drive Tommy and Jill back into town, and they'll get pancakes from one of the tourist places by the lake. And then they'll probably get arrested, because Mrs. McTeague alerted Homeland Security that two crazy anti-prom terrorists kidnapped her sweet, innocent daughter. And then they have to go to school on Monday.

And then, well...

It's a great big world out there. Sometimes Jill gets deeply wrapped up in whatever the daily tempest in a teacup is, and everything is epic and huge and vastly out of scale to the real importance and intensity of the situation. And hey, sometimes Ramie goes along for the ride, because that's what high school is for, right? But then there are times when Jill starts obsessing and then in the process tends to forget that high school isn't the entirety of human society and Winterhead isn't the be-all and end-all of human existence, and those are the times when Ramie has to remind her, yet again, that once they get out there they can do anything, and they're not going to be defined by the time they fell down and got hung upside down by the J-Bar, or even what they wore to prom. It's a great big world. And a brand new day. Ramie lifts her head off Tommy's shoulder.

"C'mon," she says, and they lever themselves to their feet, leaning on each other, and stagger back to Ramie's car.

Brand new day, Ramie tells herself.

It's going to be okay.


End file.
